children seemed unconcerned. They explored the large beech forest that separated the seminary from the parsonage. They hiked under the trees and practiced their singing and elocution there. The younger the Beecher, the more Walnut Hills seemed to agree with them.
But Harriet Porter Beecher was unable to regain her health. She’d tried to run the Cincinnati household, but relied increasingly on family members as she took to her bed. Even letters from diligent Mary back in Hartford did not brighten her mood.39 Lyman would hint later that the strain of his trial had killed her, but consumption finally took her, at age forty-five, on July 7, 1835.40 She left Isabella her dresses and books, and an entreaty that she take care of her younger brothers.41
This was not the magical Roxanna whose children were left bereft. A few days after Harriet’s death, the Cincinnati newspapers carried a cryptic obituary that was signed simply “C.” The author could have been anyone but was most likely Catharine, who was anxious to get a last dig at her stepmother, a woman she welcomed with letters but never quite warmed to. The obituary included the note that the dead Mrs. Beecher’s virtues “baffled the keen scrutiny of the gossip and the tattler,” and said the woman had thought of her time in the West as a “trial and privation.” And this:
When approaching the presence of a perfect and holy Being, the retrospection of the deficiencies of the past brought such anxiety and dismay that her spirit died within her, and it was not until after the most contrite acknowledgment of all she deemed her failings in duty to others … that her spirit found peace.42
Lyman mourned the death of his second wife, though “with a reservation or two.”43 He would, when speaking of his loss, sometimes confuse Harriet Porter with the much-loved Roxanna. The older children, too, talked about Roxanna as if Harriet Porter had only been a mirage. As he had earlier, Lyman waited about one year and then remarried, this time to Lydia Jackson, a Boston widow who brought children of her own into the union. According to one biographer, Lydia “displayed untiring zeal, supplying in part the lack of pastoral labors necessarily incident to Dr. Beecher’s position as head of the seminary, proving, in these respects, an invaluable auxiliary.”44 In other words, Lydia was perhaps better suited to the role of Lyman’s wife than was Harriet Porter. They had no children together.
Isabella continued her education at Catharine’s school, where she studied geography, arithmetic, Latin, and English grammar.45 When Isabella turned fourteen, Aunt Esther gave her the letter written for her by her mother.46 The sensitive young woman was particularly troubled with the charge that she look out for her younger brothers, Thomas and James. Isabella confessed to Aunt Esther: “I have cried and cried again and again, over that letter of my mother’s that you gave me.”47
She remained in sister Catharine’s seminary, though enrollment was lagging. The school was dealt another blow when Harriet Beecher left her role as teacher/associate principal to marry Calvin Stowe, whom she met as they both mourned the death of his first wife.48
Frantic for funding, Catharine wrote a scathing letter to the Cincinnati newspapers, accusing the town of being backward. The combination of the family’s notoriety and Catharine’s “aggressive manner, New England chauvinism, and transparent social climbing” made fundraising even more difficult.49
Meanwhile, Isabella proved herself to be a capable student — though from 1835 to 1837 her compositions showed an increasing dislike of sister Catharine’s teaching methods. From one note made on a Monday: “ … learned nothing new except some dry facts in Philosophy. Tired of school wish it was vacation … did not study any in the afternoon or evening — went to bed early. Slept soundly — dreamed of long lessons and bad marks.”50
When the Panic of 1837 all but finished the school, Lyman suggested Isabella, age fifteen, was ready to teach and support herself. His suggestion baffled Isabella, who found the thought of teaching to be entirely confounding: “I, who had never been to school in earnest, for two years together in my whole life.”51
Her older siblings — particularly her sisters — feared that Isabella’s natural good looks and bubbly nature would get her into trouble. In a letter written in July 1837, Harriet suggested Isabella be sent to Hartford to live with Mary, as Cincinnati was “exerting a very deletirious [sic] influence.”52 “She is very much I think,” wrote Harriet, “under the influence of companions with whom dress and accoutrement are the absorbing topic and who may lead her farther and farther from all serious and profitable habits.” When she was approached with the idea, Isabella allowed that she could be helpful to Mary, who had four children.
Mary was married to a lawyer, Thomas Perkins, who in 1820 joined his father’s Hartford law practice. Like his wife, Thomas Perkins showed a disinclination to enter public life. He did, however, serve as Hartford County’s state’s attorney and, in 1861, was elected a state judge of the Supreme Court by a unanimous vote of the legislature, though he declined a seat on the bench.53 Lyman allowed his youngest daughter to leave when she promised to study hard at sister Catharine’s Hartford school and help with the Perkins’ four children.54
If the Perkins family showed no inclination for lives in the public sphere, that reticence was not passed on. Their oldest son, Frederick Beecher Perkins, a librarian and author, married a woman, also named Mary, who “personified the most ‘passionately domestic of home-worshipping housewives.’”55 Their daughter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallpaper, was a fiery orator, author, and utopian feminist who was every bit as outspoken and troublesome as her great-aunt Isabella. Gilman, like Isabella, “suffered a neglect in American history difficult to explain.”56
From her 1905 piece for Connecticut magazine:
I was sent back to New England on account of the death of my mother and that is the last of my living at home with my father, and I knew him only through letters and his occasional visits. I date my interest in public affairs from those few years between 11 and 16 when our family circle was ever in discussion on the vital problems of human existence and the United States constitution, fugitive laws, Henry Clay and the Missouri Compromise, alternated with free will, regeneration, heaven and hell.
As much as she was nostalgic for the Cincinnati years, Isabella’s move back to Hartford made sense on several levels. She could continue her education. She could help her sister. And she could avoid suffering under the tutelage of a new stepmother, where she might find herself consigned — as were her older sisters — to the role of surrogate mother to her younger siblings. Instead, she settled into a genteel, upper-middle-class home, and enrolled in Catharine’s school to extend her formal education for a few years.57
4
ISABELLA IN LOVE
In the mid-1830s, Hartford was on the cusp of its glory days. The town was shifting from an economy built on oceangoing commerce to banking, manufacturing, merchandising, and publishing. The railroad would come to Hartford in 1839, and the population would reach 12,793 in 1840, up from 6,901 twenty years earlier.1
The increasingly fashionable capital of Connecticut would yield social opportunities — introductions to potential mates chief among them — under the steady eye of Mary and Thomas Perkins, both of whom Isabella loved. If this possibility was ever broached with Isabella, the conversation is not recorded, though given her age, a good match would have been paramount in the minds of her sisters.
Within a short time after moving to Hartford, Isabella met John Hooker, a square-jawed young law student who was studying in
